MITI and the Japanese miracle

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efforts to refurbish the party's tarnished image in the wake of Tanaka's rule by money-power politics (

kinken seiji

), Miki championed Takahashi's law in the Diet.

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Unfortunately for Miki and Takahashi, the prime minister's sponsorship was not enough. The lower house passed the AML revision bill in order to save the prime minister's face, but it did so only on the understanding that Shiina would arrange to have it killed in the upper house, which he did. In February 1976, Takahashi resigned because of frustration and illness. However, as he left the scene, economic critics hailed him as the most colorful and effective chairman in the history of the FTC; and the LDP, now suffering from the thinnest of majorities in both houses, discovered that his proposed revision of the Antimonopoly Law was popular with the public. Thus, on June 3, 1977, a much watered-down version of Takahashi's law was enacted; the law made it somewhat harder for companies to operate blatantly illegal cartels, and it gave the FTC limited authority to break up monopolies.

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The effect on MITI of the black cartel case and the revision of the Antimonopoly Law was to put the ministry on notice that administrative guidance must be used in the interests of the nation and the people, and that the ministry should guard against abuses of its power. MITI had some trouble accepting this message, but it eventually got the point. As former Vice-Minister Morozumi said in a lecture to his juniors in the bureaucracy, as irritating as it can sometimes be, officials are duty bound to act within the law and on the basis of law.

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Under the pressure of all these external events and of its own internal reform, the ministry at last began to internationalize. During 1974 the new Industrial Structure Section in the Industrial Policy Bureau, led by the partly Harvard-educated economist Namiki Nobuyoshi, wrote new plans for the industrial structure that went well beyond both Amaya's 1969 thesis and the Industrial Structure Council's 1971 plan. The new plans also took account of the oil crisis, the economic conflicts with the United States and Europe, the public's changed attitude toward economic growth, and the current recession.

On November 1, 1974, the ministry published its first "long-term vision" of the industrial structure, a document it revised annually for the rest of the decade and published for public discussion. The statement set stringent standards for energy conservation and petroleum stockpiling, spelled out in detail what a "knowledge-intensive industrial structure" would look like, identified protectionism as a serious threat and demanded that Japan "internationalize" for its own good, and in general explained to the public and the politicans where Japan